Canonical Unveils Plans for Ubuntu 12.10 Secure Boot

Signed GRUB2 bootloader will be implemented to provide support for Secure Boot

Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1

Canonical, through Jon Melamut, announced on September 20th that they will plan to implement support for Secure Boot in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

Therefore, after a discussion with Free Software Foundation, Canonical decided to drop the EFILinux bootloader implementation in favor of the GRUB2 bootloader one, signed with their own keys.

Support for Secure Boot via GRUB2 will also be implemented in the next maintenance release of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, 12.04.2, which will be announced on 31st January, 2013.

"There has been a lot of collaborative discussion around technical and legal implications, between Canonical, OEMs, upstreams, and BIOS manufacturers, and I’m happy with the end result."

"I’m confident that end users, OEMs, and the free and open source community is getting the best, most secure, and safest solution with Ubuntu’s implementation of Secure Boot," said Jon Melamut in the blog announcement.

On October 18th, Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will become the 17th release of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It will be powered by Linux kernel 3.5 and supported with security updates and patches for two years.

Applications like Mozilla Firefox 16, Mozilla Thunderbird 16, LibreOffice 3.6, as well as most of the packages from the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment, will be available on Ubuntu 12.10.

Don't forget to visit our website next week, on September 27th, for a detailed report on the second and last Beta release of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), where we will unveil more of Quantal's new features!

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Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default, every other package you can imagine available from the network, and professional technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world.